Hello,
I don't have pictures but it was something like this:
Main DIE big copper plate and VRMs plate was from MSI heatsink as I explained in first post of this thread, 3 copper stripes and radiator was from stock heatsink. Anyway, even with such a modded heatsink when I was using the 330W PSU and reached full power there was still thermal issue, the system still needed to be improved.
I see now Eurocom offers such an upgrade, but with standard MXM form factor GTX 1070: http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/quadro-p5000-with-m17x-r4.800489/page-8#post-10625469 (at least it's same width as standard so it can fit easily)
The card just looks just the same as Gecube one: https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?spm=a230r.1.14.34.7132bccaqt2kP9&id=557169195143&ns=1&abbucket=7#detail
Gecube 1070 is rated as 115W TDP, while MSI one should be higher I guess. I saw mine over 125W on HWinfo when reaching 100% load. I think MSI card is such a beast it gets real hot, Gecube one must be a little less powerful but it should also get lower temp on the other hand. Other good thing is it looks like Gecube one can be used with stock heatsink. My advice is if someone want to make this upgrade nowadays, then go for the Eurocom / Gecube card. Form factor will avoid to dremel the chassis, and there is no huge heatsink mod to do. Also, it probably runs cooler so I think that's the way to go IMHO.
Have fun and high FPS

Hello,
It depends which CPU you use. Only XM CPUs allow to use RAM at 2133 MHz, with other CPUs you'll get BSOD very soon after boot. I tried with 3940XM and I could set 2133 MHz on BIOS without issue, but with a 3840QM I can't go higher than 1866 or I get BSOD.

Hello,
It seems someone was brutal on this one! You can find N17E-G2-A1 GPU cores on Taobao for around 100$: https://world.taobao.com/item/550718809982.htm?spm=a312a.7700714.0.0.675ba573gBilvX#detail
Youn can also find stencils: https://world.taobao.com/item/557884869609.htm?spm=a312a.7700714.0.0.675ba573gBilvX#detail for reballing:
So even if your GPU core is dead, your 1070 can still be repaired. Some companies can do this kind of job, I guess you'll have to search for it. It would be better than throwing your expensive GPU to the trash.

Hello all here at T|I, I have good news!
OK so it's a lon,g story, I'll try to make it short but I want to give as much informations as possible so it can help anyone interested about such project.
The story is how to go from this (stock 675m):
To this (MSI GTX 1070 MXM):
I used to be a gamer when I was younger, then I worked a lot and had no time to play. I came back to gaming last year, and noticed my 2012 M17X R4 was not really up to date for gaming, so it needed to be upgraded. Before you try to do the same, you must be sure you have pretty good knowledge of computer hardware and software, because you may brick your laptop or your GPU in this process, be careful!
In order to get a MSI GTX 1070 MXM fully working on a Alienware M17X R4, you need:
- unlocked BIOS
- the 120 Hz screen
- UEFI boot with GPT partition
- find a MSI GTX 1070 MXM
- dremel the chassis
- mod the heatsink so it can fit the GPU
- make good BIOS settings so you can boot with the new GPU
- install driver with modded .inf
- fix GPU throttling issue
OK, let's go for the big upgrade, step by step.
Unlocked BIOS
Eveything you need to know is here: https://www.techinferno.com/index.php?/forums/topic/1516-m17x-r4-unlocked-bios-versions/ Thanks to svl7 for this great share!
120 Hz screen
You can find it on Ebay, for example here: http://www.ebay.com/itm/162380820165?_trksid=p2057872.m2749.l2649&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT
It's required because pascal GPUs need EDP mode to run. The nice thing is there is one LVDS connector in M17X R4 motherboard, even if you have a 60 Hz screen, so you can make the upgrade.
It's pretty easy to install, but you may have no boot issue with it, like I had. This is when I had to install unlocked BIOS so I can set graphic settings which let laptop boot with the 120 Hz screen. From what I remember, required setting was "Primary display" to PEG, see here:
GPT partition and UEFI BOOT
I had MBR partition, and since I'm using my laptop for working I didn't want to reinstall everything. I used a very nice tool to convert my system SSD parition from MBR to GPT called EASEUS Partition Master (they also provide partition and data recovery tools for years, maybe you already know this company): http://www.easeus.com/partition-manager-software/convert-mbr-to-gpt.html
They offered a discount so is cost me around 30$ to convert without having to reinstall, which is cheap for the time and all datas it saved me.
Then, you just need to make sure your boot options are set to pure UEFI, which means Load Legacy option ROM is disabled, here in the BIOS:
I noticed it can't be disabled if you're running a GPU which vbios doesn't have UEFI compliant driver. If this is the case, you'll get the "can't detect MXM card GOP driver" error like this:
Once again, thanks to svl7 you can fix this using vbios with UEFI driver for your GPU: https://www.techinferno.com/index.php?/forums/topic/2079-m14x-r2-m17x-r4-m18x-r2-uefi-fast-boot-secure-boot-gpu-issues-solved/ This is not what I did, I just enabled integrated graphics again (it's UEFI compliant), so I can disable Load legacy option. Then I could put the 1070 in, and boot successfully. With this option enabled, I had 8 beeps "GPU not recognized" error at boot, stuck with no POST like a loser.
GO BUY A GTX 1070 MXM
Here too, you can get headaches. It's expensive, and hard to find. I searched a lot, and I can give you a few advices. For me, you have mainly 3 choices:
- contact Lee James Wood, who is member of this forum and very serious seller: https://www.techinferno.com/index.php?/profile/3501-lee-james-wood/
You can also check his website: https://store.alezka.com/en/ and his Ebay store: http://stores.ebay.com/woodzstack666?_trksid=p2047675.l2563
I must say I contacted him, and at one point I had no answer, so I contacted another seller. But he explained me it was because for some reason he didn't received notification from the forum so he didn't knew my message, and missed the sale. But even he was not the seller, he gave me some advices which were really helpful when I was stuck with 8 beeps no boot problem because of the Legacy mode yesterday. Thanks a lot man, maybe you missed this sale but I'm sure you'll get lot of others since you're so helpful, thanks again!
- go buy directly from China, where you can find it much cheaper. You have one chinese marketplace to rule them all: it's called taobao: https://world.taobao.com/
Problem is if you don't speak chinese, you may have trouble just to get their chat software working, it's same kind as alibaba trade manager for those who knows. So buying from taobao is like entring an unknown area, sellers there mostly only speak chinese, some don't want to sell out of China, so it's really weird to buy from there. But prices are really interesting, for example around 3000 Yuans (410$) for a GTX 1060 MXM, and around 4900 yuans (665$) for a GTX 1070 MXM. If you're looking for a cheap pascal MXM GPU, this may feel like heaven:
-instead of trying to learn chinese, find a way to make dropship. There are lot of companies for taobao drophip, like Yoybuy for example.
I found a russian MSI forum member whose nickname is Onside182, his name is Andrew and I made the deal with him. He knows Taobao sellers, so he dealt with that for me. He was serious and helpful too, and you can chose to contact him on russian forum: https://forum-ru.msi.com/index.php?action=profile;u=1111063 (you must be registered there to see his profile), or just contact me so I give you his email address, he'll deal for your taobao order and you can pay him with paypal.
Let's make some room inside
Yeah know it's bad, but honestly I don't care about chassis integrity when it's time to get overkill Firestrike score. So yes, you have to dremel the chassis to make some room so the MSI GTX 1070 will fit in. First, you need to disassemble the whole laptop, so you can get the motherboard out:
You need to remove little sides on the MXM connector, so the card can fit in. Before
After:
You must get a modified MXM connector like that:
Then you also need to cut part of the chassis, here is the result:
Now, you can install the card:
MOD the GPU heatsink to improve cooling
Here you have 2 ways: keep stock heatsink, and mod it so it can fit as explained here: https://www.techinferno.com/index.php?/forums/topic/10982-m17x-r4-gtx-1060-upgrade/#comment-155003
Or build a custom made heatsink. This is what I did, I ordered this heatsink with the GPU: https://world.taobao.com/item/540331819333.htm?spm=a312a.7700714.0.0.ZzDuN1#detail%201%20sortie%20sur%20le%20cot%C3%A9%20ok%20et%204%C3%A8me%20stripe%20pour%20cpu%20ok
It was designed for a MSI computer, but it can be modified for the M17X R4 since copper stripes are soldered horizontally. You need to unsolder it, and solder the copper stripes and radiator from stock heatsink instead. You also need to cut off the part which must cover the CPU heatsink, which is not useful. This way, you have a more efficient heatsink, because it was designed for pascal GPU:
Soldering heatsinks is crap, when you heat one side, you can easily unsolder the other side by mistake because all heat will be transmitted everywhere very quicly. The trick is to put side you don't want to unsolder in water, and heat the other side where you want to unsolder with a torch. But I warn you: soldering this stuff is a real nightmare.
With my modded heatsink (which is so ugly and crappy I can't even make picture of it for now), I reached 72°C max while benchmarking, which seems to be pretty good temp. Right now writing on forum, GPU temp is at 55°c.
Spend some time finding the good BIOS settings
You'll have to try out some settings, and you may have no boot issues, black screens, and many errors. You'll feel very lonely at this time, I know. But searching forums saved me most of the time! If you're in trouble, just search and ask
You can boot? Well you still have to wait a little until it works!
Once we're here, we can boot with the GTX 1070 inside the laptop, and it appears as something like Microsoft basic display in Windows device manager. So we need to download official driver from Nvidia, extract it and mod the .inf file. I used this howto: http://null-bin.blogspot.fr/2015/08/how-to-modify-nvidia-notebook-driver.html
There are many others, it's well documented on the web.
Lines I added are those ones:
%NVIDIA_DEV.1BE1.057B.1028% = Section408, PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_1BE1&SUBSYS_057B1028
and
NVIDIA_DEV.1BE1.057B.1028 = "NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070"
Then it just installed fine after disabling Windows driver signature enforcement of course. I could even install whole Nvidia Geforce experience stuff.
The GPU POWER LIMIT throttling issue
OK so you think it's installed, now it's over, after all those countless hours searching, testing and tweaking our good old M17X R4? Of course you launch a benchmark, and now you notice another problem. GPU core frequency is good, then it goes low, then it goes high again, then low again... GPU is throttling. I went into HWinfo, and noticed GPU power consumption was going higher than 110W, then I had GPU throttle, it went down around 50W, then it went up again, and so on... I searched and found nothing. I thought it was because I only have 240W PSU and I must change for a 330W one. Then and angel appeared and said to me "Hey, man, this must be a BIOS setting related issue, just fix it". So I went in the BIOS again, and I noticed this setting called "adapter warning". I just disabled it, and now it's running fine. When checking, I can see I still have POWER LIMIT message, but it doesn't slow down GPU frequency, no throttling anymore.
This is the funny part where the 2012 laptop kicks ass to BGA craps
Yeahhhhhhhhhhhh!!! We can say we made it, the MSI GTX 1070 is working in the Alienware M17X R4:
Now, please have a look at this latest Alienware 17 R3 (BGA crap) Firestrike result: http://www.3dmark.com/fs/8941795 Yeah I know, this is serious expensive hardware we have here: a 6820HK CPU and a GTX 1070, such Alienware laptop must cost around 2500$, no? Of course, my poor old laptop cannot not beat this beast, what do you think?
Here is benchmak I just made today, with little OC, it's not optimized at all: http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/19201328
Ladies and gentlemen, on the left we have my 2012 M17X R4, and on the right a brand new 17 R3: http://www.3dmark.com/compare/fs/12289770/fs/8941795
To finish, before I can go at last trying to play GTA 5 at maxxed out settings, here are some links which were very useful, and can help if you want to make such mods.
MSI 1070 in Alienware ranger by loafer987: http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/msi-1070-in-alienware-17-r1-ranger-success.797893/
German Alienware forum with huge CPU and GPU heatsink mods: http://alienware-forum.de/index.php/Thread/7254-AW-17-R1-CPU-Heatsink-Pipe-Mod/
http://alienware-forum.de/index.php/Thread/7254-AW17-R1-CPU-GPU-Heatsink-Pipe-Mod/?pageNo=2
http://alienware-forum.de/index.php/Thread/8042-AW17-R1-3D-120Hz-GTX-980-N16E-GXX/?postID=69530#post69530
Zotac BOX GTX 1070 MXM in Alienware 17: http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/alienware-17-r5-gtx-1070-mxm-3-1b.800137/
I hope sharing all those informations helped M17X R4 owners to keep faith in this old good laptop. I'm pretty sure it can also handle a GTX 1080 by the way, if someone is willing to try (I can't be the guinea pig for the next step) it would be nice
This post has been promoted to an article

Hello,
I was using ICD7 so maybe using liquid metal can help but I don't think it can solve thermal issue alone. M17X R4 was not designed to cool down a 120W or a 150 W TDP GPU, so all the cooling has to be improved, not only thermal paste but the whole heatsink, especially if you want to upgrade to a 1080. You'll need to work on fan, DIE plate, copper stripes and radiator, everything will have to be modded.
No I can't make any measurement since I sold some of the stuff I was using to build another project I'm working on right now. I'm having more fun building projects than playing with it, I managed to reach my goal which was to get over 14k FS score. Only thing I can tell you is 330W PSU was mandatory to get full performance of the 1070, or there was a PSU bottleneck and I couldn't get full CPU and GPU load at the same time.
Instead of Ebay, search Taobao and you'll find interesting things, such as this one: https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?spm=a230r.1.14.15.ebb2eb2IIfArd&id=546741719542&ns=1&abbucket=5#detail
Be aware that 1080 without power connector are SLI ones, and are usually performing less better than standard ones so maybe it could be interesting to get electrical scheme of the power connector, and build a power source.
You project seems really interesting, here are may main advices:
-try to source your GPU on Taobao, it will save you money because 1080 MXM are very expensive and you'll need money for other components
-3940xm is not so much powerful compared to the 3840qm, and it can get very hot when overclocked. I think 3840qm is the best choice for the CPU
-building a modded heatsink is mandatory, you'll need to get a 1080 heatsink so you can use the DIE plate and the VRMs plate, with copper stripes from the stock heatsink (maybe you'll have to add other copper stripes) and stock radiator or bigger radiator if you find one which can fit in. Get ready to use a torch, it will be very hard soldering job.
-create your own thread, this is a huge project and you'll need advices from the whole community, there are lot of people with great computer knowledge here
-get ready to spend countless hours searching, testing and building before it will work
With a 1080 you could reach over 18k FS score, it could be a good target!

Hello,
A few updates, there are some improvements.
So first thing is I made the dual 240W PSU mod, but it's not giving good results. PSU is still seen as 240W by the BIOS, no change at all in benchmark or games.
I installed latest Nvidia driver and had a few crashes with it, so I upgraded from vbios 86.04.2B.00.14 to latest MSI vbios 86.04.56.00.3A from GT73VR 6RE here: https://www.msi.com/Laptop/support/GT73VR-6RE-Titan.html#down-firmware
It seems to fix the problem, but I saw lot of MSI users had same kind of issue even with brand new laptops: https://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?topic=280126.63
So since dual PSU mod gave no results, I tried with 330W PSU. I just tried a Delta electronics 330W PSU from AW M18x. ID chip is well recognized, and it appears at 330W in the BIOS. This is good thing.
Other good thing is now I could just reach my 14k FS score I was trying to achieve for a while: http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/19888925
As you can see, there's not much big improvement with graphics score or physics score, in fact I'm just a little lower. But there is big improvement (around 20% better) with combined score, see 240W high score vs 330W high score comparison: http://www.3dmark.com/compare/fs/12610633/fs/12542431
Also you can notice now my GPU is seen as GTX 1070 in bench results, it seems 3dmark updated their GPU database.
Yeah 14k with a M17x R4!
The fact is 240W PSU is giving enough amperage to feed CPU or GPU at full load, but not when both are at full load at the same time. Here was the bottleneck. So if you want to make the GTX 1070 upgrade on your M17x R4 you need to buy a 330W PSU, or you'll have PSU bottleneck like I had. It will work, but GPU won't perform 100% when gaming. This is good thing to know.
More than bench result, this is big change when gaming. I noticed GPU load was not high enough, it was around 50% to 80% average depending on game scenes (I'm playing GTA 5). Of course, it was same usage as firestrike combined, when there is load on CPU and GPU at the same time. Now with 330W PSU GPU load is around 85% to 95% average when gaming, so for same settings there is a huge FPS increase, this is really major change. I noticed with 240W PSU I had regular MSI Afterburner voltage limit alerts preventing to get higher GPU load before. I guess this is because power rail could just not feed more amperage, so voltage was getting low and it could not reach required voltage such as needed on frequency / voltage curve. Now there's no more voltage limit alerts anymore, everything seems to run fine.
Since I could reach my 14k target with air cooling, I don't think going for water cooling is really useful and worth the money. It could allow higher CPU overclock, but it won't bring major improvement to the setup. Now I'll just try to work on finding best settings combination for stable and performing gaming, and it will be enough. This M17x R4 is now performing as well as a 2017 brand new 2.5k$ MSI GT73VR 6RE laptop with 7820HK CPU, for real, see just same FS score: http://www.3dmark.com/fs/12002833
This is enough for me, there's nothing much to improve now.
If someone want to make the upgrade on his M17x R4, well it can be done and as you can see the good old M17x R4 can still be up to date against today's laptops, for much cheaper. I hope all informations here will help.

Hello,
Yes in fact I made a modded heatsink using M17x R4 100W 3 copper stripes heatsink and a MSI heatsink same as this one: https://world.taobao.com/item/540331819333.htm
When GPU was not at full load, I had temps around 70 to 75°c max while gaming, which was good. But now GPU can go up to max 99% load, it's getting hot as hell! After playing around 15 or 20 minutes, it can reach up to 85°c so I'm at hardware overheat level, this is a problem. I need to find a way to cool it down. I already swapped the 3940XM which is getting way too hot for my previous 3840QM, but it's not changing GPU temp at all. It still increase minute after minute.
I don't know if I should give a try to a cooling pad, or if I'll watercool the GPU, or the whole setup. Maybe I could also try to improve my modded heatsink by adding it a pair of copper stripes.
There is a real thermal problem here. I saw in hwinfo the GPU went up to 125W draw. Even whith modded heatsink, the stock radiator was not designed for that.
The next challenge is to cool down the beast.

You should post in the 1060 thread. It's not unlocked vbios that you need, but unlocked bios which is not the same. It's not the video bios, but the laptop motherboard bios. I gave the link to svl7's unlocked bios thread in the first post here. If you have same issue that I had, then you just need to follow steps I explained and it will work fine.

You should really post in the 1060 thread. You need to make sure you have everything required to run this GPU: GPT partition with UEFI and primary display set to PEG. If you have same issue as I had, you can find all informations in my first post to solve it. Unlocked bios will allow you to modify somme settings you can't change now. When you'll have issue booting the 680m, it will be the right time to put the 1060 in.

This is very interesting, I thought 1060 could not work in the M18x since it has only LVDS display: http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/gtx-1060-1070-1080-upgrade-on-m18x-r2.797282/
So it means a SLI of pascal GPUs could work this way in a M18x R2?

If this lack of SLI support could be solved somehow, I guess my next laptop could be a M18x R2.
I searched and found a brand new good quality laptop with SLI of GTX 1070 or 1080 is around 4k$ to 4.5k$ at least. Using a M18x, it could cost "only" 2.5k$ (MXM cards price, and M18x R2 can be found at fair price on marketplaces nowadays).
This is really nice to see more and more old gen laptops can be upgraded with MXM pascal GPUs. That's exactly the reason why BGA is crap, because it would never allow such kind of upgrade.